Basket

LAURA SALAKARI

Loud & Annoying in the Face of Injustice

I have no quirky pun about my name, or a cute punchline. All I want to do is to serve as your PGT representative for the next year to ensure you have a good time at King’s and that we leave behind something better than we found.

The time we spend here as postgraduate taught students is short - a year, or two at best. I want to ensure that you can make the most out of it, and that when we graduate, we leave behind something better than we experienced. I study in the MA Non-Proliferation and International Security programme — a small but important thing, and I deal with the potential worst in collective human behaviour on a daily basis.

I spent my undergraduate years at the edges of student government, furiously trying to fight for my rights, as well as others. I found myself consistently excluded from the actual governance for my nationality and language capabilities within an English-speaking college — and English wasn’t the language they were looking for. This is why inclusion is a priority for me: I understand what diversity without inclusion means, and feels like, and it’s almost worse than a lack of diversity.

We, King’s Postgraduate Taught students, are inherently quite diverse, and there’s little we can do about diversity in terms of this year’s student body. What we can, and must, do is work to ensure a complete, unbiased, and indiscriminate inclusion, and raise issues with the university to reduce potential underlying diversity issues for future years.

I will be your megaphone to the administration and student union — loud and annoying in the face of injustice. Let me do that part of work, while you concentrate on your studies and enjoying your time at King’s!

TL;DR:
Here’s what I’ll do for you:
*Work towards an increasingly more inclusive student and academic community
*Listen to individual worries you may have and work to remedy them
*Understand the composition of our student community, why it looks like it does, and ensure that it’s collective needs are met
*Create a secure environment for all, regardless of nationality, race, religion, sexuality, academic opinions, whatever individual quirks you might have
*Work to ensure that departments respect and represent academic diversity